NJ Transit, New Jersey’s mass transit agency, is pursuing its first ever planning process to draft a sustainable agency future as it pushes ahead with plans to launch its first electric bus program, at a South Jersey garage, and spend $4.3 million to prepare a second garage for electrification.

The agency on March 23 held what it expects to be the first in a series of hearings to solicit public input on the 18-month process to shape and create a sustainability plan that will address issues such as clean vehicle technology, equitable transportation and energy consumption.

The state’s 2019 Energy Masterplan, initiated by Gov. Phil Murphy, set the foundation for the sustainability plan, calling for the state to decarbonize the transportation sector, including a directive for NJ Transit to implement an electric bus program and introduce a battery electric train prototype by 2025. The state’s Global Warming Response Act (GWRA) report, which outlined legislative and policy initiatives to confront global warming, called for 10% of NJ Transit’s new buses to be zero-emission vehicles by Dec. 31, 2024, and all new bus purchases to be for zero-emission vehicles by 2032.

NJ Transit CEO Kevin Corbett said the sustainability plan will build on the agency’s existing efforts by “expanding and optimizing solar energy assets, and implementing energy-efficiency and conservation measures.”

The initiative comes as the agency on March 22 announced that it has completed the installation of eight electric vehicle chargers at the Newton Avenue Bus Garage in Camden, where the agency expects to launch its first electric bus project. The garage is undergoing a $3 million renovation, and the first of eight electric buses are expected to arrive in June, with the full complement expected by the end of the year. The agency approved a $9.5 million purchase of eight buses in October as part of an effort to convert its fleet of 3,000 buses to zero emission by 2040. (See NJ Committee Advances $45M Electric Bus Bill.)

In a separate initiative, the agency on March 14 awarded a $4.3 million contract for the infrastructure design for the deployment of battery electric buses at another facility, Hilton Garage in North Jersey. The expenditure includes a survey of the agency’s 16 garages statewide to assess infrastructure upgrades needed at each garage for future transitions to zero-emission buses.

“Through our garage modernization program, and our zero-emission bus system design and investment planning study, we will transform our infrastructure, our routes [and] our operation to modernize our infrastructure and network to support zero-emission buses,” Erin Hill, an energy and sustainability analyst for NJ Transit, told the hearing.

Car Emissions vs. Mass Transit

Agency officials argue that mass transit is “inherently” sustainable because each person that takes mass transit instead of a private vehicle is reducing their carbon footprint. While a private car emits 0.96 pounds of carbon per passenger mile, commuter rail emits 0.33 pounds and a bus emits 0.64 pounds, according to a presentation at the agency’s sustainability meeting.

For that reason, the GWRA report calls for an increase in NJ Transit’s bus and train ridership from 2020 to 2050, seeking a 54% hike in the most optimistic scenario. The report also encourages the creation of transit villages, with residential areas that are easily reachable from rail stations and so reduces the need for car use.

Environmentalists have criticized the agency for moving too slowly, however. A 2021 report by New Jersey Policy Perspective, a nonprofit think tank, urged the state to move faster in transitioning its diesel buses to zero-emission, saying it would reap extensive health benefits and remove “significant environmental and public health costs.” The report expressed skepticism that the agency is on track to meet the 100% EV bus purchase goals by 2032, in part because the state has no dedicated funding source for the $5.7 billion that NJ Transit expects the transition to cost. (See Environmentalists Call for Faster Transition to Electric Buses in NJ.)

NJ Transit officials said they are looking for input from all stakeholders on the sustainability plan, especially for determining key issues that it should address, including two surveys: one of agency leaders, and the second of community stakeholders. The six “sustainability themes” the plan will encompass include community engagement, air quality, and improving fuel and energy-use efficiency while the agency transitions to clean energy technology, Marcella Thompson — vice president at HDR, a consultant working on the project for NJ Transit — told the hearing.

Sustainability and Reliance  

When the hearing opened to the public, however, the agency’s focus on sustainability and cutting emissions quickly ran into an ongoing concern from some environmentalists about its plan to build a 140-MW natural gas-fired generating plant in Kearny as part of its “resiliency” preparations. The plan is part of a proposal to create a microgrid that would provide power to the agency and enable it to keep three key rail lines going in the northern part of the state if commercial power is knocked out by a storm or other incident, as it was after Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Several speakers at the hearing decried the proposal and questioned how the agency could claim to be moving toward clean energy and a sustainable future while it is moving ahead with a gas-fueled power plant that will be adjacent to environmental justice communities that already see excessive air pollution.

Ken Dolsky — co-leader of the Don’t Gas the Meadowlands Coalition, a group created to oppose the plant, and a steering committee member of Empower NJ, a statewide environmental group — said he heard a lot of “good stuff” in the presentation about the sustainability plan. But it was marred by the agency’s continued pursuit of the generating plant, he said.

“The bottom line is, if you’re going to go ahead and you are going to build a gas plant, the hypocrisy of this sustainability program is evident, is obvious,” he said. “I mean, this is nonsense. You’re talking about tweaking things around the edges while the elephant in the room is this new gas plant that you’re going to use to make our greenhouse gas problem worse, to make our air quality problem worse.”

In response to that and other concerns about the generating plant, John Geitner, senior director for energy, environment and sustainability for NJ Transit, did not directly address the issue. But he told the hearing that the agency does not “view resiliency and sustainability as opposing topics or in separate spheres.”

“The challenge is to make sure that we’re thinking about resiliency in terms of what it means for sustainability,” he said. “If you don’t have a resilient system, it’s not going to be sustainable.”

“The more resilient system that we have, the more sustainable it is going to be for future generations,” he said, adding that many transit agencies are facing the same issue. “We’re all sort of struggling with what it means to create a system that that will withstand challenges, whether those challenges are weather related, whether the challenges are service reliability related.”